Posted on 07/06/2015 1:55:06 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
It’s easy to point out which tactics won’t work to get American conservatives engaged in the fight against climate change. Recently I’ve critiqued arguments that climate hawks should extend a welcoming hand to right-wingers and that Pope Francis’s climate change encyclical will move any Republicans to embrace the issue.
But merely knocking down others’ arguments is insufficient when they are trying to solve a real problem. And this problem is quite real: In order to pass comprehensive climate change legislation federally — and to get the right policies also working in tandem at the state and local levels — some conservative and Republican officeholders will have to get on board. So the argument is not over whether this has to happen, as it must, but how it can happen.
Here is my answer: Environmentalists and Democrats should beat climate science deniers over the head with aggressive attacks until they realize it is in their interest to back climate action.
To figure out how to get Republicans to vote for something, you should look at how Republicans behave. Appeals to their sense of moral obligation to protect people or the environment always fail, as do arguments based mainly on conservative intellectual principles.
To take just one stark example, look at the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, a treaty negotiated and first signed under former President George W. Bush. Since signed by virtually every other major country in the world, and signed again by Obama in 2009, it would basically just commit the U.S. to abiding by the same standards already in place under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed by the first President Bush in 1990. But the right wing developed bizarre theories about how it would infringe on U.S. sovereignty. Senate Republicans rebuffed disabled veterans and former Republican presidential nominees John McCain and Bob Dole, who lobbied for the treaty’s ratification, and voted it down in 2012 and again in 2014. Morality, compassion, and even loyalty to their own party’s leading figures were no match for the fear of a right-wing primary challenge.
Or consider that only one House Republican would vote for a health-care reform bill modeled on a conservative think tank’s proposal and on Mitt Romney’s own successful health-care system in Massachusetts. But 199 House Republicans voted against raising the U.S.’s debt ceiling, risking a default that would unleash a catastrophic global economic meltdown. Congressional Republicans cannot be cajoled into doing anything — no matter how necessary or logical — that they perceive as potentially damaging to their reelection prospects.
Now let’s look at GOP behavior related to climate change itself: Many leading Republicans have oscillated wildly between calling for climate change action and denying climate science altogether, based solely on one factor: their own political self-interest. GOP climate flip-floppers include McCain, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich. Clearly, Republicans are willing to support regulation of carbon emissions if they believe that will further their political careers.
So the way to win them over is to change their political calculus: to convince them that combatting climate change is in their self-interest.
Earnest entreaties obviously don’t work. If you want to know how that pans out, ask former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who lost his seat to a Tea Party challenger in 2010 after accepting climate science and has since been working, without any notable success, at convincing Republicans to come around on climate science.
To find an alternative approach, you have to look back at recent U.S. political history for examples of how one party forced the moderate wing of its competitor to switch sides on an issue. As it happens, recent U.S. political history is replete with such examples — they’re just mostly of Democrats adopting Republican positions.
In the 1980s, Democrats were trounced in three consecutive presidential elections. Cynical Republican operatives like Lee Atwater had figured out how to split middle-class and working-class white suburban voters away from the Democrats: through wedge issues that played on (often racist) resentments and fears. Ronald Reagan established a playbook, still followed by Republicans today, of inveighing against allegedly lazy welfare recipients who live the high life at the taxpayers’ expense. The wedge-issue method reached its apotheosis with the infamous Willie Horton commercial in 1988, paid for by a conservative political action committee with ties to George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign, blaming Gov. Mike Dukakis (D-Mass.) for a rape, kidnapping, and pair of murders committed by African-American convict Horton while he was out of Massachusetts prison on a furlough. Despite the fact that Reagan himself had presided over a more lenient furlough program in California, the ad was notoriously effective.
Republicans were successful in putting Democrats on the defensive about welfare, crime, affirmative action, the power of organized labor, and national security. In response, the “New Democrat” movement — led by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and magazines like The New Republic and The Washington Monthly — set out to move the Democrats rightward on those issues. The result: Bill Clinton, a former DLC Chair, won the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Clinton sought to neutralize his party’s liabilities on hot-button social issues with compromise taglines: “mend it, but don’t end it” on affirmative action and “abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” On some issues, Clinton made larger substantive concessions, such as signing the draconian 1996 welfare reform law that has had a disparate racial impact. The “Clinton crime bill” of 1994, written by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), expanded the death penalty, incentivized states to extend criminal sentences, and eliminated federal funding for prisoner education.
Bill Clinton’s successors in leading the Democratic Party, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have adopted many of the same cautious, moderate positions on these issues. Obama backs free-trade agreements opposed by unions. He has struck a hawkish, secretive posture on counter-terrorism activities at home and abroad. During the George W. Bush presidency, both Clintons backed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as did the Democratic leaders in both Houses of Congress, future Democratic presidential nominee and Secretary of State John Kerry, and future Vice President Joe Biden. Virtually every Democrat in Congress voted for the PATRIOT Act. This reflexive deference to the security state has trickled down to the local level. New York’s supposedly liberal mayor Bill de Blasio just struck a deal with the City Council to hire 1,300 additional cops.
How did Republicans win over so many Democrats on contentious issues like crime, welfare, and national security? It wasn’t by earnestly reaching across the aisle and trumpeting the bipartisan nature of welfare reform, tough-on-crime policies, and antiterrorism activities. It wasn’t by gently trying to persuade Democrats that these are good policies on the merits or that they are really in keeping with liberal values. It was by aggressively hammering on these issues to defeat Democrats until Democrats who wanted to win nationally realized they needed to adopt different positions.
That’s the strategy that climate hawks must mimic: aggressively attack Republicans who deny the science of climate change or say we should do nothing about the problem. Turn the issue into a liability Republicans are nervous about. Take out a few high-profile Republicans by emphasizing their opposition to climate action and you’ll start to see Republicans suddenly finding the science of climate change a lot more convincing.
It is a truism in politics that a gaffe only sticks to a candidate when it reinforces a pre-existing reservation voters may have about him or her. If a candidate gets tagged a flip-flopper, any statement that sounds slippery will get hung around their neck. The Republican attacks on Democrats over welfare and crime worked because they reinforced rural and suburban white voters’ negative stereotypes about cities, minorities, and the Democrats who they suspected of coddling them.
Climate change presents a great opportunity to copy that game plan in reverse. What are the negative stereotypes that younger, more educated, urban, and non-white voters hold about Republicans? That they are ignoramuses who reject science, that they are selfish, greedy, or in the pocket of big business, and that they are old and out of touch. Climate change lends itself to attacks that play on all of these themes.
Tom Steyer and his PAC, NextGen Climate, have the right idea. In 2014, they targeted key Republican climate change deniers and went after them with sharp-elbowed ads. They homed in on how climate science denial reflects the GOP’s deliberate ignorance. And they ran ads showing how corporatist Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker were favoring the Koch brothers over average citizens. The most memorable of all of these was the one that showed the 97 out of 100 white-coated scientists who accept climate science staring skeptically at a trio of simple-minded cavemen stoners who protest that “I’m not a scientist” and “We like it hot.”
The results of Steyer’s efforts so far are inconclusive. Of the seven Senate and gubernatorial candidates NextGen targeted in 2014, four still won their races. But NextGen was waging an uphill battle. 2014 was a midterm election, and the second one in the Obama presidency. Historically, the president’s party almost always performs badly in second-term midterms. The last few cycles have also seen a bifurcation of the electorate: younger voters and non-white voters, whose turnout drops more in midterms, are much more heavily Democratic than older white voters. We don’t know, for example, whether Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) would have won by more than 1 percent if NextGen hadn’t targeted him. We also don’t know if Scott would have lost to a better candidate than the oleaginous, unpopular, party-switching former Gov. Charlie Crist.
Steyer intends to double down in 2016, and the smart money says his approach might work better in a presidential year, with a younger, more diverse, more liberal electorate.
Republicans are already starting to feel nervous and defensive about climate change. Denying climate science is so out of step with the electorate that many Republicans have shifted to the “I’m not a scientist” dodge, which is a retreat from full-on denial. And Democrats are gleefully making fun of them for it. Obama mocked the “I’m not a scientist” line in this year’s State of the Union address and in other speeches, as did Hillary Clinton did in her campaign kickoff speech. Democrats should continue mocking them and pressing their advantage until Republicans give in.
A long winded version of saying “go Alinsky on their butts.”
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a ball of fire that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
bttt!
Do you think I would be embarrassed being ridiculed and attacked by the flat earth society? Or how about the people wearing tinfoil hats? Global Warming falls into this category. I LAUGH AT AND REDUCULE these people...(not the other way around).
Me too. However the Left has been pushing this non stop in schools, in the media and politically since the first panda bears started popping up on yogurt cups back in the 70s - a non-stop drumbeat that has influenced (knee jerk) a lot of people. So much so, that companies now eagerly use it as an effective marketing ploy for low information consumers - despite the fact that this assault on energy has driven up costs for everything.
When Public Schools quit teaching natural science and started teaching politically correct science, the seed was planted that would sprout the huge tree that has become the Climate Change farce.
The key to it all was to completely “gut” all real science from the public educational system and replace it with fake science designed TO SCARE the timid, weak and ignorant.
Look how well the plan has turned out? We have two generations of students that progressively learned less and less real science and now pass that on to their own children.
You are correct and “State of Fear” is the game plan.
A TRUE conservative will NEVER vote for this nonsense
This is the problem: scientific illiteracy and the lack of intellectual rigor and iron self-principles.
Bullying like the author suggests is futile against someone with a hard science degree who knows the fraud that is "climate change".
If people change their positions based on political self-interest, then they get what they deserve.
I agree, that doesn't work because advocates of the "climate change" scam cannot refute our arguments.
It is telling that that the author lets a little truth slip through though. The "real" problem isn't climate change, it is not getting their way, not getting the power they crave.
Here is my answer: Environmentalists and Democrats should beat climate science deniers over the head with aggressive attacks until they realize it is in their interest to back climate action.
So much for doing the right thing, or actually being based on science. Nope. None of that. Just personally attack them into doing what they perceive is in their best interests rather than what is best for the people who elected them. Says a heck of a lot about the liberal-fascist mindset. Apparently they see retreating to self-interest as a common thing. They will fail because unlike the liberal-fascists, we have integrity.
...look at how Republicans behave. Appeals to their sense of moral obligation to protect people or the environment always fail, as do arguments based mainly on conservative intellectual principles.
Of course they do, because when you look at the facts, "climate change" is nothing but a scam. It is one huge power grab.
The “science deniers” are persistent in their quest for world-wide socialism.
Ben Adler says, "Always defer to politics and ignore science, the Constitution and common scense. That way you can control the __Federal (Campaign-fund) Treasury(TM)__ and buy more votes."
The misguided and misbegotten "Americans with Disabilities Act" is a mere act of Congress ... it can be modified or repealed by a mere majority vote of Congress and a Presidential signature. Treaties can be more difficult to deal with.
:: The idiot far left...actually think they would do a better job of running businesses and manufacturing ::
And, they, with only academic credentials to show for such hubris and stupidity.
Kinda like the 1917 Marxists who over-threw the Russian Czarists (who, BTW, were already weak and ripe for ^hope and change^) to champion !!THE WORKERS!! who provided the industrial production (albeit according to the savvy financial decisions of the proletariat managers) I.E. no profit, no job, comrade!. They soon found THAT out, didn’t they?
Oh...never mind...that is too much history for the common man to understand.
Here, have a cuppala-shots-a-wodka, comrade.
(the above is tongue-in-cheek...somewhat)
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
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Obama’s Clean Power Plan could push millions of minority Americans into poverty
Global Warming on Free Republic here, here, and here
....which is surprising, because normally empowering the goobermint at their employers' expense is what you'd expect from Republicans! [eyeroll] Not really making his point with that one.
All the “climate action” in the world is not going to affect the global climate by a single degree.
Well, asshole, here is my answer: Conservatives should beat climate science whackos over the head with aggressive attacks until they realize it is in their interest to abandon their massive FRaudulent con game!
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